A World of Emotion
by enthusiasmgirl
Summary: Matt's not the only one who lives in a world that others can't possibly understand. Foggy's got powers of his own. He's just always dealt with them very differently.
1. Manifestation

_**Note: This is a fill for a Daredevil Kink Meme prompt. The prompt is as follows:**_

 _ **Foggy is a powerful mutant who has never been able to really control his gifts. He manifested even before puberty, and has been on suppressants all his life. He still gets a little overlap and experiences a limited amount of his ability, but it's dulled and nowhere near as bad as it could be.**_

 _ **After Matt reveals himself to be Daredevil, Foggy decides to deal with his newfound worry that Matt might not only fall down a manhole but might die bleeding and alone in an alley, by learning to use his powers. He figures that it's the only way he can keep Matt safe, and that's got to be worth a few hurdles at the beginning, right? He's not a kid anymore, he's got to face his fears sometime. So he stops taking his suppressants for the first time since his power originally manifested.**_

 _ **Turns out he's a whole lot more powerful than he was when he was nine. To say he finds it difficult is an understatement.**_

 _ **\+ Foggy is some sort of psychic/empath/telekinetic (although I'm up for anything really)**_  
 _ **\+ Foggy maybe mentioned something about the whole mutant thing to Matt in college, but Matt has absolutely no warning about the extent of it before all of this kicks off.**_  
 _ **\+ Matt would be actually pretty well placed to help Foggy control his powers IF he wasn't terrified of ending up messing up Foggy like Stick did to him.**_

Franklin didn't talk until he was three years old. This worried his parents greatly. The doctors told them it was nothing to worry about. "He's just a late bloomer," they said. But the more time passed, the more nervousness crept into their tone as they said it. Words like autistic, developmentally disabled, or deaf began to be uttered as possibilities as the doctors became increasingly concerned. But still, they assured the Nelsons that they should simply wait and see. It was probably nothing. At least, nothing that they could find. Yet.

Franklin didn't talk, but he felt. His parents could tell that. He was extremely sensitive and intuitive. If someone around him giggling or smiling, so was he. If someone around him was angry, he'd throw a tantrum. And often, even if he wasn't talking, you could tell by the look on his tiny face that he was contemplating the world around him very seriously.

When Franklin finally found his voice, it didn't happen in a way anyone was expecting.

One day, his mother picked him up from preschool and watched him interact with the other children for a moment. She saw the way that they all carried on simple conversations with one another, the way that her son sat apart from the group. By the time they got to the car, the tears were coming and she was unprepared to stop them. She had held them back for so long. She was scared.

She felt her son's hand clutch hers and looked down to see him staring at her intently. "Sad," he said. She gasped. "Oh, sweetie," she replied, hugging him and smiling. "Not anymore." He smiled too. "Love," he said softly.

* * *

Franklin became Foggy at nine years old. By then, his sensitivity and empathy had become so pronounced that they were noticeable to anyone who met him. He was shy to the point of almost being considered mute, and he'd often get lost in thought in the middle of a conversation and seem to have his head in the clouds, hence the nickname.

He still cried when other people did. Still raged when others angered. His parents weren't surprised when they had him tested for the mutant X gene and he tested positive. It explained so much, although the exact nature of his abilities remained hazy, uncertain.

His mother asked him once why he had such difficulty focusing, and he tried to explain it. "Too many emotions," he said. "They get in the way." But it was hard for him to explain. "Don't you feel it too?" he asked. His mother shook her head. "No," she said. "It's just you, darling. You're special." It wasn't as comforting to him as it should have been.

It was concerning. But he was smart, and functional, and overall a very happy child, and so nobody worried about it that much.

* * *

The older Foggy got, the more it became apparent that his abilities were proving to be more of a curse than a gift. As he approached his teenage years, he became moodier, even surly. He cried more, stopped smiling. He had difficulty making friends.

His own shyness worked against him, because he deliberately isolated himself. His parents tried to encourage him to be more social, but he refused. "You don't understand," he'd say. "It's intense. It's too much. Please don't make me." He'd come home and slam the door to his bedroom, refusing to come out except to eat, talking to nobody.

Even when he did try to make friends, the other kids his age were afraid of him. His parents could sense it. They couldn't blame them. Foggy had slowly become perceptive to the point of appearing invasive to others, intuitive to the point of seeming odd. He told off boys in his class for impure thoughts. He rebelled against and talked back to teachers who he claimed were hateful, which frequently earned him detention. He once entered the girls bathroom at school to hold a crying girl and comfort her. She hadn't complained, but other girls had. He claimed that he couldn't help himself, that he'd felt compelled. Nobody quite knew what to do.

So, when the principal forced Foggy to see a school psychiatrist, and they recommended to his parents an experimental suppressant meant to block the effects of the X gene, everyone agreed. Something had to be done.

* * *

"Hey mom!" Foggy said, grinning, as he came through the front door after school. "Is it okay if Steph and Eli stay for dinner? I told them I'd tutor them a bit in history, since they're struggling."

"Of course!" Mrs. Nelson said, smiling back. As Foggy's classmates followed him into the dining room and began pulling books and laptops out of their bags, she reflected again on how far her son had come and how grateful she was for the suppressants that had helped him so much.

Once Foggy began taking the suppressants, everyone had been shocked by how complete the transformation was that followed. It was as though a weight lifted off of his shoulders and a new kid emerged, one who was funny and relaxed, happy and kind. He attracted people to him like a bee to honey, and was more focused than anyone had ever seen him. His grades went up. His circle of friends grew quickly. Everyone considered it a miracle.

She had asked Foggy once, afterwards, if he minded that he was no longer special. "No," he said, "Because I'm normal. And that's so much better."

It never occurred to anyone to question it.


	2. Suppression

"Excuse me, is this room 312?" the voice asked.

Foggy looked up and asked who the person was looking for, embarrassed to realize that the man was blind. His empathy kicked in hard as he remembered the emotions he associated with the disability, connections he'd made as a child. Fear of the darkness. Helplessness. Frustration. He shook them off quickly, dismissing them with barely a second thought as he did whenever his abilities dared to resurface, and apologized.

The feelings surged forward into his conscious thought again briefly when the man asked if his blindness would be a problem, along with a sadness that lingered, and Foggy realized that the person in front of him was his new roommate. He quickly reassured the man in front of him that it wouldn't be a problem and changed the subject, his cheerfulness relentless in the face of the feelings bubbling up underneath the dull haze of his suppressants. It wasn't often that he picked up strong emotions from anyone anymore. He didn't like it.

Once he knew the man was Matt Murdock, he remembered reading about Matt's accident in the paper as a kid, used it as a topic of conversation, a way to prattle on and avoid dealing with his own uncomfortableness at the emotions the man was transferring to him without realizing. He joked, did everything he could to get the man to smile, chuckle, be put at ease by him. He even hit on him just to get him to blush and feel the heat of the compliment. And it worked. Foggy felt the rush of awkward feelings fade, told himself that he would double up on his suppressants later just to make himself feel better, and headed off to get coffee with Matt, certain that ultimately the two of them would get along just fine.

And if, later, Foggy had to drag Matt back to their room so he could drink something stronger than coffee, he convinced himself it was only celebratory and had nothing to do with the way the man was affecting him.

* * *

"Hey Foggy?" Matt asked from where he was studying quietly on the bed in the dorm room.

"Yeah Matt?" Foggy asked, looking up from his position laying on his stomach own bed watching television.

"Can I ask you something kind of personal?" Matt asked.

Foggy just grinned, even though he knew Matt couldn't tell. "Of course! We live together. It's not like we can really keep a lot of secrets from each other anyway."

"I just..." Matt started to ask, but lost the nerve.

"Just come out with it already, Murdock! Geez!" Foggy said, hoping to push his friend into feeling more comfortable talking to him about anything.

Matt smiled. Mission accomplished. "I was wondering about the pills you take. I noticed that you take them a few times a day. And there's a lot of them. Do you have a medical condition I should know about? In case anything happens."

"Oh," said Foggy, trying to sound casual but surprised by the question since he hadn't expected Matt to notice. "No. I'm fine, buddy. You don't have to worry about me. Those are just my X gene suppressants." Foggy internally crossed his fingers that the man wouldn't be upset to find out that his roommate was a mutant who hid it from him.

"You're... the X gene?" Matt said, clearly trying to wrap his head around it. "You're a mutant?"

"Yep. Well, not really," said Foggy, hopeful. "They're suppressants, right? So technically I am. But it's not like I have any powers or anything."

"Right," Matt said. "But you did?" Matt asked, curious.

"When I was a kid I could sort of... feel stuff. People's emotions. Empathy, you know?" Foggy said. "It was pretty minor in the scheme of things, but I didn't want to deal with it and so... suppressants."

"And they work?" Matt asked.

"Oh, yeah!" Foggy said, reassuring him. "Totally. So you don't have to worry about it. Aside from the DNA being a little different, I'm totally normal. I promise."

"Good," said Matt, but Foggy suspected that there was more his feelings on the subject than that. He never found out though. Apparently, he had sufficiently sent Matt a vibe indicating that he didn't want to talk about it, and so it didn't come up again.

But Foggy was too perceptive not to know, deep down, that there were a lot of things that they never talked about. He just didn't want to deal with it. That's what the pills were for, after all.

* * *

Foggy looked up from his laptop, startled by the sound of the slamming door as Matt entered the room in a furious rage. "Dude! What the hell?" he asked. He hated when Matt got angry like this. He always refused to talk about it and It meant that his bad moods could linger for days, draining Foggy's energy and patience.

"I got a D on the case study response for McConnell's class," Matt said, slamming his backpack down on his bed. "A D! Which means that I can't get higher than a B in the class, which means that my entire GPA could be effected."

"Oh, man, really?" Foggy said sympathetically. He shook his head as he remembered that assignment. "I hate to say this, and please don't take this the wrong way, but I kind of saw that coming."

"I know," Matt responded. "McConnell hates me. And he assigned that case study to me on purpose to get me to react. He knew that as a blind man I would have difficulty formulating a defense strategy for a woman accused of murdering her child due to the expenses and stress related to the child's disability. I should file a complaint."

"You could," Foggy said, "but if you did, you'd be doing exactly what McConnell wants, proving to him that you shouldn't be here."

"What?" Matt asked, shocked. "Foggy..."

"C'mon, Matt!" Foggy said. "I'm with you, I am. McConnell's an ass, and I don't blame you for being upset. But you know as well as I do that you deserved the D. You got too emotional, took it too personally, and so it impacted the work you did. Which is exactly what a good lawyer is not supposed to do."

"So what?" Matt said, "Am I just supposed to be indifferent? Cast aside my basic decency and morality?"

Foggy sighed. "I know that you have this vision in your mind that being a lawyer means fighting against injustice and standing up for people in need. I've heard you quote Thurgood Marshall, I know how passionate you are, Matt. But you're going to have to learn how to work within the reality of what the law means. The law is reason, free from passion. That's Aristotle! Fundamental. Built into the concept. We're here to learn how to separate out our emotions from our ability to reason to reach ultimate truths. That's how we help people, and that's why I'm here."

Matt slumped down to sit on his bed, looking defeated. "You're right," he said quietly. "Dammit. I can't believe I got a D. I let him get to me."

"It'll be fine," Foggy said. "It's not like all your other grades aren't impossibly high. If anything, this has put me off of my growing suspicion that maybe you are actually a robot programmed for higher learning. Your possible secret is safe for a little while longer. Plus, knowing you, you're already planning how to fit in extra credit work to make up for it."

"Yeah, I am," Matt said, sighing and laying back on the bed. "Hey, Foggy?" he asked, head turning in an attempt to look Foggy in the eyes.

"Yeah?" said Foggy, returning to his own studying.

"Do you really believe that?" he asked. "That there's no truth in people's emotions? That separating out how you feel about things helps people?"

"Take it from a guy who was once able to feel everything," Foggy replied, "People are better off when they don't let strong emotions get in their way and cloud their judgment."

Matt looked like he wanted to say something, to ask Foggy to elaborate, but he didn't. Foggy was grateful. He didn't want to talk about it.

* * *

"Are you still here?" Marci asked as Foggy lazily moved to turn off his phone's alarm and sit up. She whacked him in the side with her arm, irritated.

"Yeah, sorry," Foggy said. "You wore me out last night, woman! I wore you out too, apparently, so you didn't notice and I didn't think it would be a big deal."

"Foggy Bear, you need to ask permission next time," Marci said. "I don't want you getting any big ideas about this being a relationship or something."

"Believe me, I have none," Foggy said. And he didn't. He knew what he had with Marci, and he wanted to preserve it as much as she did. What they had was simple. Fun. It was good conversation and great sex. For her, it meant he paid for dinner or drinks. And at the end of the day, if they blew each other off or saw other people, there were no hard feelings. In fact, there were no feelings at all.

Feelings were messy, especially lately. His control seemed to be deteriorating and more and more strong emotions had been bleeding through his defenses. His doctor had doubled the dosage of his suppressants.

Initially, Foggy has suspected that it might be Matt's fault. Matt had wormed his way into Foggy's heart like an adorable but wounded puppy. The more Foggy learned about the man's life and struggles, the more his empathy kicked in, investing him in Matt's world in a way that he wondered if the other man had noticed.

But in the end, the culprit was just his age. His doctor had told him what he was experiencing was typical. Apparently, many mutants' abilities became more developed as they transitioned into adulthood, and his had already been very developed for his age when he began taking them. Foggy had been surprised, and more than a little terrified, when the doctor told him this. His memories of his childhood before he began taking his suppressants were slowly fading the further he got from them, into a dull haze of sadness, loneliness, frustration and fear. Thinking about what might happen if the pills ever stopped working made Foggy's gut churn with anxiety, his heart beat fast in his chest. He didn't want to think about it.

"I'll see you in class later?" he asked Marci as pulled on his shirt and grabbed his backpack.

"Maybe," said Marci.

As he left, Foggy realized that he didn't care if he saw her or not. It probably should have bothered him more than it did.

* * *

Foggy listened patiently as Matt quoted Marshall at him, once again, in their tiny windowless broom closet at Landman and Zach. "We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent..."

"...from the fear." Foggy finished the sentence, having heard it so many times before.

"Do you think what happened in there today was right?" Matt asked, and Foggy reflected on how often this same argument had happened between him and Matt over their years of friendship. Sometimes he wished that Matt could just give an inch and agree to disagree with him rather than force the issue, but he understood why it never happened. Was grateful for it, even.

"No, Matt, I don't think it was right," Foggy said, frustration in his voice. Didn't the man know him better than that by now? "But according to the law, if he did disclose trade secrets to a third party other than his doctor..."

"He didn't," said Matt, and the certainty in his voice irritated Foggy. How could Matt be that certain about anything? Foggy could feel it, knew it to be true. It pushed itself forward into his conscious thought alongside the potent mix of determination, optimism and fierceness that he'd come to associate with the man who he would follow anywhere.

"How the hell do you know?" Foggy asked.

"Because I... I have a feeling," Matt replied.

"Last time I checked," Foggy said, "those are inadmissable." He continued trying to convince Matt to be practical, to think about the larger picture, to not let his emotions get in the way of their success, of their bright future at Landman and Zach. But in the end, it was futile. Before the argument even began, Foggy knew in his heart that Matt would win. He always did.

Foggy was surprisingly okay with that.


	3. Deterioration

"The Incident", the real estate agent called it. With a capital I.

"Is that what we're calling it now?" Matt asked, and Foggy couldn't blame the woman for snapping her answer back at him.

The Battle of New York had changed everything. For everyone. The entire world had watched as the neighborhood Foggy and Matt had grown up in was nearly leveled by alien invaders from a portal that reached to the other end of the universe. Watched as supermen, heroes in suits of armor and unfrozen from WWII, saved the day. How could it not have put everyone on edge? How could it not have created a strange new world order that seemed to permeate every aspect of life in the city?

Personally, Foggy remembered very little of that day. He was grateful for that, since the brief screaming headache and sense of impending doom he had experienced just before blacking out had been painful enough. He couldn't bear to think about what it would have been like to have to sit in the locked-down dorm room and watch the events unfold on television, to not know that Matt was trapped in a darkened and crowded subway car or that his sister was cowering under a restaurant booth listening to death and destruction happen around her.

But Hell's Kitchen's loss was turning out to be Nelson and Murdock's gain. Foggy shook his dark thoughts off and attempted to haggle, and the agent continued selling them on the run-down, cramped office space. She was right. It was a good deal. It didn't make Foggy any more okay with Matt deciding for both of them though. He chuckled as Matt said they'd take it, and engaged his new partner in another round of their usual argument over what kind of clients they planned on taking. At this point, Foggy only did it for fun. He knew Matt wouldn't listen to him, and he didn't particularly mind. But one of them should at least try to be the voice of reason.

* * *

Sometimes, Foggy just didn't understand Matt. For all that he could read Matt's stronger emotions, the intense periods of anger, depression and helplessness that frequently bubbled up underneath his calm exterior, the man could be maddeningly obtuse and withholding when he wanted to be. And right now, Foggy could tell that there were things that his friend was keeping from him, things that were motivating his actions that Foggy could only guess at.

Why had he offered to take Karen Page's case when the woman had admitted to them that she had no money? They were a new practice. Now was not the time for the two of them to be standing up for the little guy. Now was the time for them to be establishing themselves with the medium-sized guy, someone who could help them build a reputation, gain stability, and keep the lights on. Foggy had known that Matt was serious about only defending innocent clients, but they needed to at least charge them. It was crazy to Foggy that Matt couldn't see that. And that he was so convinced that their client was innocent in the first place.

From the moment Foggy had met Karen Page in the police interrogation room, a wave of emotions had swept over him that his suppressants hadn't been able to tamp down. Strong emotions. Ones that told him immediately that there was so much more to the woman than anyone knew, more than she was telling. And none of it was good. Of course he would never tell Matt that.

"There's something not right about this case," Matt said. "I can feel it."

"You can feel it?" Foggy asked. Matt had been saying that a lot lately. Foggy was getting frustrated by Matt's feelings, especially when there was clearly more to them than he was saying. But the thought of confronting him about it made Foggy feel like a hypocrite, and so he kept his mouth shut.

"All right," he said, "I'm just gonna say this once, and we can move on. You don't necessarily show the best judgment when beautiful women are involved, Matt."

And that was true. Matt didn't even try to deny it. Foggy had come to Matt's rescue in that respect on more than one occasion in the past and, for all that he complained, he had done it happily. In a lot of ways, life had hardened Matt. But Foggy knew that, for all the ways that his blindness and his upbringing had made him have to be tough, deep down Matt was soft. He had too big a heart, and it was squishy like a stress ball. Foggy was always careful with it, but too many of the people Matt had let near it had squeezed it so it oozed between their fingers and it broke Foggy's heart every time. He didn't want Karen Page to be another person who let Matt down.

But Matt needed Foggy to back him anyway. And so he would. He always did.

* * *

Later, as Foggy dug into a great meal served to him by an innocent woman and filled with virtue, he reflected on the fact that following Matt, and all of his strange feelings, somehow always ended up being worth it in the end.

* * *

Foggy knew exactly why Karen was still in the office so late. How could he not? Her fragile emotional state didn't seem, to him at least, to be all that well-hidden. Foggy was certain that even someone without his abilities must be able to sense what she was going through.

Although given that more and more emotions had been slipping past his barriers lately, he also sometimes wondered if it really was just him. The thought of it made him go cold.

As he accompanied her to Josie's, he felt her terror, her deep sense of mistrust but also her naivety. Her admirable but ultimately wrongheaded determination and stubbornness. But primarily, he felt her resignation and cynicism towards a world that seemed determined to beat her down. He couldn't fault her for that. He'd felt it before too. He knew firsthand exactly how much darkness, loneliness and isolation the city that never slept had to offer. It was why he took the suppressants, why he was now taking almost triple the dosage he had been on as a teenager.

But it brought out his protective instinct. It was one thing for him to have to feel it, for it to be his curse, and another thing entirely for others to have to deal with it. So he did what he always did. He tried to make it better.

And if that meant drinking the eel, well, so be it.

* * *

Foggy loved Matt. So much. Too much. If Karen brought out his protective instinct, Foggy didn't know what to call the instincts and feelings that he had related to Matt. Or the feelings that Matt had related to him. Foggy just knew that both sets of emotions were more intense, more overwhelming than anything he had ever conceived of even before he began taking his suppressants. He also knew that he wouldn't trade them in for anything.

So when he felt Matt start to pull away, when he started to realize the potential scope of the secrets Matt was keeping from him, that the man was hurting, he didn't know how to handle it. When Matt stopped picking up his phone, didn't come to the door when they knocked, started having to explain away cuts and bruises, Foggy didn't understand. And he was afraid to. So he upped his dosage of suppressants again, and chased them with alcohol. Because what the hell else was he supposed to do? He felt lost.

* * *

Mrs. Cardenas was dead. That poor woman, who had genuinely (stupidly) put her faith in Foggy. She was dead and it was all his fault.

Foggy was furious at himself. Matt had slowly drifted further and further away from him, and he had no idea why. Karen was amazing, and Foggy could feel himself falling for her, but there was also something dark and mysterious about the woman that he knew was dangerous. And Hell's Kitchen, the neighborhood he had grown up in that felt like home, now seemed unrecognizable to him. Karen was right. For all that he tried to pretend that it wasn't true, it turned out that the city was full of dark corners, back alleys and creeping shadows that he'd never noticed before. He'd worked so hard to create an emotional distance between himself and the world, and it turned out that it hadn't helped. He was as naive and soft-hearted as anyone else, and just as susceptible to tragedy.

And so, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he wanted to feel everything he had coming. All the pain. All the grief. It was masochistic, he knew, but he was so sick of the dull fuzziness, his increasing inability to feel anything for himself even as he feared feeling too much for anyone else. So he stopped taking his suppressants. Cold turkey. A very, very bad idea.

It meant that when he knocked on Matt's door, drunk as a skunk, and when he was sobered up by the site of his best friend, the man he loved, laying dying on the floor in front of him, he couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle anything. It was all he could do to dial the right number after Matt took a swing at him, all he could do to sit silently while a stranger stitched Matt up and try not to vomit at the site of all the blood.

When Matt woke up, when they finally talked, he felt raw, exposed like a nerve.

At first, he was angry at Matt. So angry, a burning rage that he hadn't felt in years. But it was tempered, because the emotions coming off of Matt were impressively desperate, wanting, and terrified. The terror was particularly acute. He was convinced that Foggy would leave him. That the confession would drive him away. He was so full of love, devotion, but also determination and self-loathing. What was Foggy supposed to do with that? It wasn't as though he had been entirely honest with Matt over the years either.

So Foggy refused to give in to the emotions, even as he was confronted for the first time with the full force of them. He listened patiently, quietly, to Matt's explanations. He threw the facts back in Matt's face, called upon his skills as a lawyer, his reason and rationality, to help Matt understand what he was doing. Fell back upon the comforting logic and lack of emotion inherent in the law to make his case that what Matt was doing was wrong.

But then Matt told him the story of the little girl and her father. And Foggy couldn't help but understand exactly where Matt was coming from. And it made him sick to think about.

Foggy remembered laying in his bed at ten years old, and being overwhelmed by the sadness of the suicidal woman who lived in the apartment above them, and the lonely isolation of the elderly woman the floor below who had no family and whose only contact with the outside world was a Meals on Wheels volunteer. Remembered the beatings that his neighbor two doors down used to inflict on his wife, on his son, and the helplessness and quiet seething rage that his victims felt. The wounded pride and grandiose arrogance of the man hurting them. He remembered the way that, over time, he had learned how to distinguish between the different kinds of pain that humans could experience. Learned to be able to pull the betrayal of adultery apart from the betrayal of a friend's gossip, the fear of terminal illness apart from the fear of asking a girl out on a date or being confronted by a criminal in a darkened alley. And the way that eventually those things had made it impossible for him to be happy, and desperate for everyone around him not to know. He had heard the sirens too, for a long time, but in a different way than Matt. And he'd turned away. He'd felt like he had to.

And now his friend was crying and bleeding in front of him. And Mrs. Cardenas was dead. And it was all Foggy's fault.

So he left. And he slept with Marci, even though he knew, with more certainty than he ever had before, that she didn't even really like him. And when he finally got home, he took a handful of suppressants without even checking to see how many he grabbed. He just didn't want to have to deal with any of it anymore.

* * *

"Bzzzz. Bzzzz." Foggy groped at the nightstand next to his bed clumsily trying to find his phone, his eyes barely open, brain barely functioning. He finally found it and raised it to his eye level, squinting to see who it was. Not that it mattered. He didn't want to talk to anyone anyway. It was Karen. He dismissed the call and threw his phone onto the bed next to him. He didn't care. He was past that point.

For two full days, he had done nothing but lay around his apartment, barely moving, barely eating. It was as though he had finally, at long last, taken enough suppressants to not just erase all trace of other people's emotions, but his own as well. He felt nothing. Not even relief at feeling nothing. He was just numb, broken, and done with everything.

This, he thought, must be what it was like to die and come back as a zombie. Shambling forward, with no real purpose, existing for the sake of existing. He was still wearing the suit, rumpled and smelling of sweat, that he had been wearing at Matt's. He still hadn't showered.

Finally, he rose to use the bathroom, then headed to the kitchen to see if there was any food there. There wasn't. And he was hungry.

So he shuffled out the door, intending to stop for a hot dog. But when he passed Josie's he decided that drunk and hungry was preferable to stuffed and back in his bed again.

And that's where Karen found him.

"You're a dick," she said.

"The hell did I do?" he asked, but he knew. Of course he did.

She was still high-strung and determined to take down Fisk. Foggy remembered what that felt like, both his feelings and hers. It was all gone now. There was just emptiness in its place.

"It won't be enough," he told her.

"You sound like Matt," Karen said, and didn't that just sting. Foggy was surprised to feel the hurt. He hadn't thought it was possible.

Karen wanted to know what happened to Matt. It wasn't Foggy's responsibility to be the one to tell her. No way was he doing that. She'd shoot the messenger, and Foggy had no interest in being Matt's delivery boy. She wanted to know why he wasn't at the office. He didn't know what to tell her, so he told her that Nelson and Murdock had hit a rough patch. Understatement of the century.

She tried a new tactic. She told him that Elena's building was being torn down. And that... something in him woke up at that. What, he didn't know. But he felt it, like a punch in the gut.

Because she was right. At the end of the day, she was right and he knew it. His entire life he had always taken the path of least resistance. He'd always been cautious and played it safe. Been terrified of inviting the pain he'd experienced as a child back into his life. And look where it had gotten him.

But Karen had never backed down. Even when it nearly killed her, she always stood up and fought. And Matt had spent his entire life fighting everyone and everything, never even considering the alternative, the safer path. It was who he was. And Foggy loved them both for that.

He sat there with his head almost laid down on the bar and thought about who he wanted to be. He remembered Matt quoting Marshall again. "We must dissent from the apathy," Matt had always reminded him. "We must dissent from the fear." The words rang in Foggy's head, burned themselves into the very core of his being as he sat there. How many times had Matt said them for Foggy to be just finally truly understanding their meaning?

Indifference. Apathy. Fear. Once again, Foggy was struck by the irony of the fact that he had spent his entire adult life trying to distance himself from his emotions, and was only now realizing how much his life was ruled by them, but the wrong ones. It had happened so slowly that it snuck up on him, and now it was hitting him like a freight train.

Foggy realized that someone did have to fight for Hell's Kitchen. Someone had to make what happened to Mrs. Cardenas matter. And that maybe it should be him. But most importantly, maybe he needed to fight for himself. He needed to get the hell up and stop being so afraid of the pain, learn to face it head on instead.

And he resolved that he was going to talk to Matt, and that after dealing with everything with Fisk somehow, the next step would have to be to face his ultimate fear, stop taking those damned suppressants, and see what he was really capable of.


	4. Withdrawal

After Fisk, after everything had settled back into something that resembled normalcy (but which Foggy knew wasn't, could never be again), Foggy booked a doctor's appointment. He didn't tell Matt or Karen, didn't want them to know. Telling them would mean reminding Matt what he was, confessing how bad things had actually gotten with his dosages and his drinking. Telling Karen would mean he would have to admit to being a mutant, and he didn't know how she'd react to that. So he kept it to himself.

After that night in the bar, the night Karen called him a dick, Foggy had quit drinking. And he had lowered himself back to the dosage he was supposed to be taking of his suppressants, which sobered him up considerably. Some strong emotions were again effecting him, but he could handle it. It wasn't so bad. It got him through.

He'd had a brief relapse when Ben Urich had died. He had a vague memory that he hoped never fully returned of Josie cutting him off once he started sobbing onto a very unamused biker's shoulder. He'd even slept through the funeral the next day, which had actually been a relief because between the hangover and his emotional state he knew he would have had difficulty holding himself together and appearing normal.

But he'd picked himself up, dusted himself off, and he was doing better. And now he knew that he was running out of excuses not to fulfill his promise to himself to stop taking the suppressants entirely.

Besides, how could he justify continuing to take them and turn his back on the things happening around him when Matt was willing to sacrifice so much of himself for others? It made him feel like a coward. It made him feel selfish. And he wondered if there was a possibility that his abilities could help Matt. That he could find a way to be a hero too and keep his friend safe.

The doctor, as he had anticipated, told him not to. She discouraged him from continuing to take the dosage he was taking, but recommended lowering it slowly, and staying on them. She warned him that going off of them would be difficult and that, because every mutant's manifested powers were different, she couldn't predict what the side effects might be. And even if it were possible, he was so young when he began taking them that his powers hadn't even had the proper time to fully evolve and develop.

But Foggy was certain. He needed to do this. For Matt and Karen. For Hell's Kitchen and his clients. But, most importantly, for himself.

* * *

The first week he lowered his dosage to the same one he had initially taken as a teenager, as the doctor told him to do.

He felt better than he expected. The raw feeling was there. He was on edge, and more sensitive than usual, but he felt like he was handling it. It was different, that was all. And not necessarily in a bad way.

Sure, it meant that he could less easily block out the fact that something was bothering Karen, and that the paranoia and guilt that it caused were consuming her. But it also meant that when he made her laugh, when he saw her smile in a way that made her eyes crinkle, or made her blush and push her hair back behind her ears, he felt that too. Really felt it, in a way that made something warm and content settle in his stomach.

He'd forgotten what it felt like to feel others' happiness, others' kindness and sense of humour. He realized that he had missed it, all these years, like an ache that was always there but he'd never recognized as anything other than normal. It shocked him.

And Matt... he was surprised by the intensity of the things Matt felt. He didn't think that was possible, since he'd known Matt was different from the moment he'd met him. It was why Matt's emotions tended to break through the suppressants' effects more than they should have. But now, Foggy could really understand it. The passion. The fierceness. The intelligence and perceptiveness hidden behind the masks he wore, both literally and figuratively. It made Foggy realize that finally, after everything that had happened between them, he knew Matt. He really knew him in a deep and meaningful way that nobody else got to experience. It felt like a privilege that he didn't deserve.

Those first few days, Foggy was content to sit in his office, or on his couch at home, and just let himself feel whatever came to him. He would slowly stretch his empathic sense out as best he could, like a muscle that he had let atrophy, and attempt to determine it's strength and agility. He learned that his landlord was in the middle of a contentious divorce. The woman who lived across the hall from him had kids, and Foggy enjoyed letting the warmth, creativity and exuberance that they felt into his heart. At their office, he learned that the real estate agent who had leased their office to them frequently gave tours of other available offices, and that she really did have a problem with blind people, and black people, and gay people apparently. She was awful.

None of it bothered him the way he had expected it to. Because he was in control. He could reach out and feel things, but he never felt overwhelmed or like he was drowning the way he frequently had as a child. He realized that he didn't know what he had been so afraid of. He was fine.

* * *

The second week, he halved the dosage. Things became more difficult, but not unmanageable. He had to focus harder to maintain control, and he could feel the range of people's emotions flooding in become larger, more varied. But he was proud of himself for moving forward, for confronting his fear and coming out on top. Or so he thought.

On the fifth day of that second week, Matt came into his office, anxiety and concern emanating from him in a steamroller of emotion that felt so visceral to Foggy that he worried he might topple over. This irritated Foggy, since of the two of them Matt was the one whose side and leg had been aching all day. Foggy could tell, even though Matt didn't know that. It frustrated him.

"Foggy," Matt said, and just the way he said it broke Foggy's heart. One word, but Foggy could feel all of the hurt, love and guilt in it. "Are we..." Matt asked, and suddenly Foggy had the sensation of being small and terrified, like a child watching his parents leave him alone at school for the first time.

"Are we okay?" Matt asked. "Please don't leave me", is what Matt's heart told him.

"Of course," Foggy said. "Why wouldn't we be?" He could hear his voice choke up as he asked the question, and hoped Matt didn't notice.

"You know why," Matt said, "I just... I thought we were doing better. After everything..."

"We are," Foggy said, trying to inject the certainty he felt into his voice and reassure Matt. He meant it.

"Are you sure?" Matt asked, "because the last few days you've been quieter than I've ever seen you. Withdrawn. It's not a word I would normally use to describe you Foggy, and I'm just worried. You seem different. Off. And you've been avoiding me. And I can't..." Matt tried to articulate how he was feeling but Foggy had reached a breaking point. Things had been awkward with Matt for too long and he was tired of it. He needed his friend to be the calm at the center of the storm, not a tidal wave.

"Don't do that!" he snapped. "You can't, Matt, it's too much! Don't come in here hating yourself and projecting all of your guilt, and exhaustion, and fear of abandonment, and love onto me like it's something I'm supposed to fix, okay? You're too loud, you're suffocating me!" Foggy suddenly realized that there were tears streaming down his face and he had his hands clamped to his head and was rocking forward in his chair.

"What?" Matt asked. "I don't understand." Foggy added panic to the list of things churning in his stomach, vibrating throughout his body.

"LEAVE!" he yelled, and Matt did. In fact, he couldn't leave fast enough, tripping over himself to get out the door. In fact, Foggy heard him stumble into Karen as she came back from a coffee run, apologizing hurriedly as he left the office altogether.

Karen was confused, and so she came and knocked on his slightly open door to find out what had happened. Foggy felt her surprise and worry as she took in what she saw. "Foggy," she asked, "what happened?"

Foggy had no answer. Only an ashamed, hysterical, wild sobbing that shook his whole body as Karen ran over to hold him without needing to know why. And eventually, he sensed her begin to sob too, like he had broken through a dam of emotion that she had been holding back.

This was what he'd been afraid of. He was most definitely not fine. None of them were.

* * *

"I killed Fisk's lackey, Mr. Wesley," Karen confessed to him from the floor of his office, with her head in his lap and him stroking her hair. "The one from Global Consolidated." It was dark since the lights were off and evening had darkened the sky. Matt hadn't returned. They had both held each other until they had collapsed from exhaustion. Karen sounded numb, like she was too tired to feel anything anymore. Foggy missed that feeling. It tempted him to pull his suppressants or the bottle of scotch out of his desk drawer to reach that point, but he resisted. He wanted to be sober for this. He needed to know the truth.

"How? Why?" Foggy asked.

"He kidnapped me when he found out about the fact that Ben and I had visited Fisk's mother," Karen replied. "Threatened me. You. Matt. Everyone I loved. Made the mistake of leaving his loaded gun on the table in front of me. So I shot him. And then I ran."

"It wasn't the first time, though, was it?" Foggy asked. He knew. The guilt that overwhelmed her wasn't just about Wesley, and he could sense the churning anxiety that she had that someday he and Matt would know her, really know her, and reject her. So much had happened to her before they had even met her, he was sure of it.

"No," she said. "It wasn't. I..." she choked on the sentence, and Foggy continued to stroke her hair, wordlessly reached out with his empathic sense and, without even realizing he could, encouraged her to continue.

"I grew up in Nebraska. Middle of nowhere. I had a rough time. My mother was an addict, in and out of jail, and my dad left to go start a new family, a family he loved and wanted. I was in and out of foster homes. Didn't even finish high school. When I was 18, I got my GED and enrolled in community college. Started waiting tables to pay for it. Waiting tables turned into dancing. Dancing turned into... something else."

Foggy listened and was overwhelmed by her experiences as she spoke, feeling the anger, bitterness, but also the hopefulness and ultimately helplessness. He let it blanket him, accepted it for what it was, and tried to overlay it with his love of this woman, with affection and strength. Somehow, he wasn't sure how, he was certain it was helping her.

"I made a lot of money. More than enough to finish school. But I ended up dropping out. Mixed up in drugs, and the wrong people. One day, God it wasn't even that long ago, there was this guy... he... well he wanted something from me that I wasn't willing to give. Which is really saying something, because I gave so much..." Her voice trembled and Foggy wiped her tears away with his thumbs as she looked up at him. It was intimate, but Foggy was surprised by how strangely comfortable it felt.

"You killed him," he said.

"I did," Karen said. "I shot him with his own gun too. And I ran. Figured I could get lost in New York City, start over. And then when everything happened with Daniel..."

"Oh wow," Foggy said. "Matt and I had no idea." And suddenly Foggy was angry. Angry at himself for being on the suppressants and missing what was right in front of him. And angry at Matt, for being able to sense that Karen was telling the truth but not how much more to the story there was than what they had thought.

He felt Karen tense underneath him. "You're angry," she said, but she sounded surprised instead of upset.

"Yeah," he said, being honest. "But at myself. Not at you, Karen."

"I know," she said, sitting up and looking at him intently, "I could feel it."

"Wait, what?" Foggy asked, confused.

"Yeah," Karen said. "It was like... like it came over me and I knew what it was. I knew it was you. I don't understand."

It took Foggy completely by surprise. It wasn't something he had ever considered before. He knew that he could pick up emotions from other people. They had flooded him, assaulted him, for as long as he could remember. But he had never projected his own emotions onto someone else before.

"I'm sorry," Foggy said. "I didn't tell you, because I didn't think it mattered. I'm a mutant."

"You're a mutant?" Karen asked. "That's... oh wow... seriously?"

Foggy nodded. "I was on suppressants. I went off of them a couple of weeks ago. That's why all this happened. Why I blew up at Matt and he left. I can sense people's emotions, what they're feeling. And, apparently, project my own, which is news to me. Jesus..."

"That's amazing," Karen said. "You are amazing. Why would you suppress that?"

Foggy smiled. Of course Karen would say that. "Because I couldn't keep feeling other people's pain all the time. It was just too hard. I wanted to be happy. And normal."

"But what you can do is so much better than normal!" Karen said.

"Is it?" Foggy asked. He gestured to the two of them sprawled out on the floor by his desk, their shirts wet with tears, in the dark. "You understand what normal means, right? And better than? Not sure how you could apply those terms to this."

"Foggy," Karen said, palming both his cheeks with her hands so that he was looking her in the eye. "I felt the anger, yes, but you also made me feel so much better, just now. Made me feel loved. Made me feel how strong and brave you think I am. That's a beautiful gift."

"You think?" he asked, tentatively.

She nodded, and leaned in to kiss his forehead gently. He could feel, really feel, how much she meant it. And how much she loved him. And he knew he'd made the right choice.

* * *

After walking Karen home, Foggy decided that he needed to talk to Matt. He had tried calling his cell phone, but he knew better than to think that Matt would pick up. He was certain that Matt had decided to go out, that somewhere a rapist or mugger was paying for what Foggy had said to his friend.

So Foggy wandered along a couple of the busier Hell's Kitchen streets, hoping to run into Daredevil.

He stopped for a slice of pizza, and sat in the restaurant staring out the window, stretching his gift out again, with a newfound respect for exactly how powerful it might actually be. He let the adoration and warm fuzzies of a newly engaged couple wash over him, and it tickled him and made him grin. He observed a woman alone waiting for a bus, sensed the anxiety and paranoia that sat in her chest as she waited. Reflected on how many things women had to feel that men didn't even think about. He sensed two men in a barfight nearby, could feel the challenge and desire to prove worth that emanated from it. Reflected again on gendered emotions, whole ranges of them and wondered if anyone really understood the differences the way he did.

He was older now. He understood things that he hadn't as a barely pubescent kid. He couldn't believe that he spent so many years being so afraid of what he might be, of the strength of other people's emotions. Maybe he had even underestimated the power of his own.

And then he felt a sudden flash of fury, the same boiled over intensity that he had only felt one place before. It was Matt's fury, as he had told Foggy calmly about letting the devil out, told him in a matter of fact way that he never intended to stop.

He chucked his pizza crust and plate in the garbage and followed the feeling, letting it lead him around the corner and towards a darkened alley between a pool hall and a closed bookstore. He knew better than to approach the alley and interrupt the fight, knew that Daredevil had the situation well in hand. So he stayed out of sight, and waited. A woman had just been attacked. Foggy could sense the adrenaline and fear. There were two attackers. One was already unconscious. The other was the one Daredevil was engaged with. He was overconfident, and arrogant. In the face of the devil's judgment, Foggy knew that he didn't stand a chance.

Foggy watched with a strange detachment as the woman fled the alley in the direction of the police station, her feet almost moving of their own accord following Daredevil's command to run. "What are you doing here?" he finally heard, directed at him and not in the gruff tone that most people heard come from under the horns.

Foggy moved into the alley so that nobody could see them talk, finally saw Daredevil in the flesh, red suit gleaming under the motion sensor light beaming from a nearby building. He was bent over the forms of the two attackers, tying them up to ensure that they didn't escape before the police arrived.

"I wanted to apologize," said Foggy. "For earlier. I didn't mean it."

"Really?" said Matt, "Because it kind of sounded like you did. And I don't blame you. I deserve it."

"No. You don't," Foggy said firmly. "Think about it... what you saw? Did that seem like normal behavior to you? You were the one who said that I haven't exactly been acting like myself lately."

"So what was it then?" Matt asked. "What's been going on with you, Foggy?"

"I went off my suppressants," Foggy replied.

"Oh." Matt said, sounding surprised. "Is that... I don't... why?"

Foggy could hear the sound of police sirens coming closer, and he was reminded of how surreal the entire situation they found themselves in was. "Why don't I meet you at your place?" he asked. "We can talk about it there. Getting into it here, with you dressed like that and two unconscious assholes at our feet, probably isn't the best idea."

Foggy left the alley, and shook his head in amusement as he heard a clang and thump that he suspected was Daredevil leaping up a fire escape. He got to Matt's door, opened it with his key, and wasn't surprised at all to find Matt already inside and drying off from the shower dressed only in sweatpants.

"Hey," Matt said. He was nervous. Until this week, Foggy would never have believed how nervous Matt was all the time, how timid and scared. Man without fear indeed. It made him remember all the times he had envied the man's confidence and self-assurance in college.

"Hey, buddy," Foggy said. "How are you feeling?"

"Can you tell me?" Matt asked. "Now that you're... you know?"

"A mutant?" Foggy asked. "I always was, you know. Technically."

"I guess so," Matt replied. "It's strange to think about, I have to admit. I never really thought about you that way before, even after you told me."

"At least I gave you the choice to factor it in," Foggy said, only a small amount of bitterness finding its way into his voice.

"Yeah, you did," said Matt sadly. "Why go off the suppressants now? Is it because of me?"

"Partly, yeah," Foggy said, "Although I tried to go off them when all the stuff with Fisk was going on, after Elena died. Bad timing."

"Oh. That means... that means you were off of them when..." Matt asked, his voice trembling and quiet.

"Yeah," said Foggy. "It didn't exactly help the situation. I just got tired of them. I kept having to increase my dosage so that they would keep working, which I think means I was getting more and more powerful, which is making things now pretty confusing. And I just wanted to feel something real again, without the suppressants getting in the way, even if it was pain. To see what it was I was so scared of, you know?"

"I think so," Matt said. "I'm not really sure I understand though. You've never really talked about it with me before."

"I know," said Foggy, "and I'm really sorry for that, truthfully. I keep thinking about the fact that if I had, maybe you wouldn't have felt the need to keep so much from me. It just... it sucked, man. It wasn't just that I could feel people's feelings. It was that I could feel all people's feelings, all of the time. Happy, sad, angry, afraid. All of them. It was making me crazy. And it was making the people who had to put up with me even crazier. So taking the suppressants just seemed like the right thing to do at the time."

"And it doesn't anymore?" Matt asked.

"No," said Foggy.

"Are you doing this because you want to... to get back at me for the things I'm able to know about you? Or because I make you feel like you need it?" Matt asked. "I don't want you to do something that causes you pain because of me."

"No!" said Foggy. "I'd like to be able to understand you better. That part I'll admit to. And it is kind of nice to know when you're lying to me. It levels the playing field a bit. It was just time. I couldn't keep living my life running away from it."

"I never meant to hurt you," Matt said.

"You didn't," said Foggy. "Today was intense, Matt. You are intense. Not that that's a bad thing. It's just something I have to get used to. I didn't mean to take it out on you."

"I don't think that's going to go away, Foggy," Matt said. "And I don't like the idea of you walking around feeling... feeling like I do all the time."

"Cut yourself some slack, Matt," Foggy said. "You forget that I can feel the good stuff too."

"Good stuff?" Matt said, and he shook his head like he thought what Foggy said was nonsensical.

"Your love for me, for instance," Foggy said. "That's technically great stuff. Joyful. Certain. Honest. It sings, Matt, in high, clear tones like a hymn in church. It makes me feel lucky just to have felt it for a moment. And now that I've felt it, I don't think I could go back, even if I wanted to. Which I don't. And I love you too, man. I can only hope as much."

Matt smiled. It made Foggy sad, because it was a soft, shy smile. It wasn't enough. So he tried something. He reached down within himself, and he found the love he had for Matt. And he reached out with his empathic sense and tried to help Matt understand.

Slowly, the smile widened, and there was even a sniffle and a tear. Foggy knew he'd achieved his goal.

"Oh my god," Matt said, and it sounded like a prayer. "Are you doing that?"

Foggy nodded. Matt surged forward and hugged him tightly. And Foggy knew that they were okay. Better than okay. Because he had a gift.

* * *

At the beginning of the third week, the first day after going off of his suppressants entirely, Foggy woke up screaming, and everything fell apart.


	5. Evolution

It was too much. Much too much. A dizzying cacophony of feelings and thoughts were brutally and unrelentingly assaulting him, and all of his defenses were stripped away. Excitement. Desperation. Curiosity. Confusion. Lust. Anger. Where was he? What was happening to him? Whose emotions was he experiencing? There were so, so many and he couldn't separate them out from one another. He was vaguely aware that he was terrified, but he recognized that even his own feelings were getting lost in the morass of churning emotion he was stuck in almost as quickly as he noticed them. It was getting harder and harder to remember where other's emotions ended and he began. How long had this been going on?

Then, an oasis. Particular emotions, ones that he knew intimately. Panic and concern. Fury, but also devotion. Matt.

Instinctively and impulsively, Foggy focused on Matt's emotions, metaphysically grabbed them and yanked them towards himself. Once he had grasped them, he wrapped them around himself like a security blanket until he felt safe again, weighted himself with them so that he didn't get carried away, lost forever.

After a moment, he realized that he could feel himself breathing. In. Out. In. Out. And he was laying on a bed. He could feel it underneath him. It was his bed.

"-please," he heard someone say. Matt again. More weight, anchoring him. "Foggy," he could swear he heard Matt whisper reverently. "Foggy, please, I need you. Stay with me." But did he say it? Foggy couldn't tell if Matt was talking with his mouth or his heart. Did it matter? Maybe all that mattered was that Foggy heard it. He tugged on the blanket again, pulled it closer, wanted to burrow himself in the comforting warmth of Matt's emotions and keep listening.

Suddenly, he felt a shock run through his body. Surprise. A gasp. He opened his eyes, not even realizing that they had been closed, and found confused hazel eyes peering into his, felt a trembling palm stretched out over his chest, his heart hammering against it. "Foggy," Matt said, smiling the sad smile that always made Foggy's heart break, and Foggy saw Matt's lips moving. "You're awake."

"Matt?" Foggy said with curiosity, and he realized that his own lips hadn't moved. But he knew Matt heard it by the way his face twitched. Could Matt hear his heart in more ways than one?

Someone else was in the room with them. He drifted for a moment as Matt turned his head to talk to the other person, a woman who radiated calm and steely resolve. Claire, Foggy realized, but he couldn't really make out what was being said and didn't want to turn his head to check. He was too fixated on Matt. Matt's hand on his chest. Matt's other hand gripping his tightly. The fact that Matt looked so vulnerable without his glasses and his eyes were wet with tears.

"Why are you crying?" Foggy said, but again his lips didn't move.

Matt's head snapped back around to stare unnervingly at Foggy. Whatever he'd been saying to Claire was cut off, mid-sentence. Surprise again, Foggy realized. And awe. He was in awe of Foggy.

"You scared me," Matt said, and this time Foggy didn't see his lips move. He sensed Claire's concern, and her fear. Fear of them. Of what they were doing.

"She's scared because she doesn't understand this. I don't either. Foggy, what's happening?" Matt wondered.

Foggy just shook his head. He didn't know. He closed his eyes again, exhausted, but content that he was safe, that Matt was with him and wouldn't let him drift too far. He fell asleep cocooned in a gentle haze of relief and love.

* * *

"He's asleep," said Matt, but he didn't remove his hand from Foggy's chest, didn't get up from where he sat on the edge of the bed. His eyes didn't leave Foggy's face, even though Claire knew he couldn't see the man he was keeping vigil over.

"Do you want to tell me what the hell just happened?" Claire asked.

"I don't know," Matt said.

"Bullshit. You know something," Claire said. "Matt, you can't just ask me to come here and help you out with something like this without any explanation. This wasn't part of our agreement."

"I'm sorry, okay?" Matt snapped. "He... I think that he reached out to me somehow, with his abilities. It was like he was communicating with me, sending me emotions that he was feeling. I think he was using me to anchor himself. I can't explain it any better than that."

Matt's nerves were frayed, his patience worn thin.

When Foggy hadn't shown up for work that morning, he hadn't thought anything of it at first. He knew that Foggy had been weaning himself off of his suppressants. He hoped that maybe the man was just having a bad day. Matt could sense, more and more every day, how difficult a time his friend was having. It worried him. He didn't know how to help, if Foggy would want him to help.

When the morning had turned into the afternoon and after Matt left his fifth voicemail for Foggy, he realized that something might be really wrong. He didn't realize how wrong until he let himself into Foggy's apartment and found the man still in his bed, sweating and writhing and crying, completely out of his mind. In a panic, he had dialed the only person he knew who might be able to help.

When Claire arrived, it turned out that the hospital didn't see a lot of cases similar to Foggy's. Most powerful mutants were forced to go underground, or ended up at one of the schools, and the majority of them were much younger than Foggy. She hadn't been able to help much, had only provided Matt with the worrying information that one thing that the hospital did see a lot was suppressant overdoses. The experimental nature of the drugs and unpredictability of mutant abilities made it a common concern, but one which the general public didn't seem to care much about.

Matt was upset when he realized that he couldn't provide any information to Claire about Foggy's dosages, or how long he'd been taking them, or even the nature of what the man could do. Foggy had never talked to him about it, never shared that part of his life with him. The irony of the situation wasn't lost on him, and the guilt he felt was overwhelming.

Matt remembered what Foggy had said to him as he'd sat across from him in his living room the day he'd found out about the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, sadly nursing his beer. "Are you telling me that since I've know you, any time I wasn't telling the truth, you knew?" Foggy had asked him, and he'd looked as though Matt may as well have jammed a knife in his chest. Matt had assumed that Foggy was mad about the little things. Times he'd been masturbating. Times he'd told white lies to spare Matt's feelings. Now, Matt suddenly thought back to all the times that he'd asked Foggy if he wanted to talk. If he was okay. And how so many of those times, Foggy had answered with a lie. And Matt had let it go. Because there were things Matt didn't want to talk about either. It was easier that way. But it meant that now, after all these years, this was his fault. Because he should have known.

And so he sat with Claire and waited, unsure if his friend would even recover from whatever it was that was happening to him. Unsure if there was anything he could do to help. Terrified that he would be left with no choice but to call the hospital. He pictured his friend in a straitjacket staring at padded walls or, worse, in a government lab or one of the specialized prisons that nobody wanted to admit existed for mutants who couldn't be controlled.

And then, just as his rage and anxiety were about to crest into a full-on panic attack, he had felt it. Felt his own consciousness, the part of him that the Catholic in him might call his mortal soul, being pulled towards Foggy's, even merged with it until for a brief moment he wasn't sure where he ended and the other man began. And then, just like that, he was himself again but staring at Foggy almost as though he could really see him for the first time. He was beautiful. And lost.

Of course Claire didn't understand. He couldn't possibly expect her to. But he knew that, whatever had happened between them, it meant that there was a chance that Foggy might be okay. Matt resolved that if Foggy really was lost, then he would be the one to help him find the way home. He owed him that.

* * *

Foggy blinked and tried to focus his eyes on the ceiling above him. As quickly as he regained awareness, he found himself drowning again under a flood of emotions that his tired brain couldn't identify, couldn't make any sense of. He gasped and struggled, tried to focus and avoid getting pulled away again.

A weight shifted on top of him, and Foggy realized that it wasn't abstract. It had mass. There was a chest and arms and a leg draped over him like an actual human blanket. Matt. He could sense the way Matt's chest was rising and falling with each breath, feel his friend's heart and lungs pressed against his own. It was intimate. But it felt right. In. Out. In. Out. It made him happy to feel how at peace Matt was as he slept. He slowed his breathing so that it synced with Matt's and wrapped his arms around him to pull him closer, lay there for a moment allowing Matt's presence to center and calm him.

Then, without thinking, as naturally as breathing, Foggy continued to reach out and entangle himself with Matt, wrapping his consciousness, everything he was, around Matt to reassure him and extend the peace.

Suddenly, Foggy felt flashes of things, stronger than he had ever experienced before. They weren't emotions, but they were related. They weren't visual, but all of them formed pictures in Foggy's mind. Memories. They must have been Matt's.

Memories of the two of them each tersely changing the subject in conversation accompanied by stabs of guilt piercing him like daggers. Memories of an old man crumpling up a paper bracelet and walking away accompanied by a feeling of falling down a deep, dark pit of loss and shame. Memories of standing over a horrifically beaten man and dripping blood from his fists accompanied by a feeling of burning rage but also triumphant victory.

Foggy felt the panic and loss of control grip him again, tears welling up in his eyes as his breathing quickened and his chest tightened.

With a start, Matt's eyes opened and once again Foggy looked up into them to see confusion but also realization and pain.

"Foggy," Matt said, desperation in his voice. "I didn't mean... I'm sorry." He rolled away, and Foggy sat up slightly, upset.

Foggy couldn't say anything. He wanted to, but he was certain that if he did it wouldn't come out the way it was supposed to, that the words wouldn't form. It scared him. So he reached down inside of himself and projected the way he felt at Matt, hoping he would understand. "It's okay,"he tried to say. "You're okay. I accept you. I'm not going anywhere. I need you. I love you."

He felt Matt calm slightly. Understood that Matt wanted to know what was happening to him, what he could do to help. So Foggy took Matt's hands in his own and opened everything up, untethered himself. He tried to let Matt into all of the emotions he could sense and show him what his world felt like.

Foggy could tell it had worked when Matt jerked his hands out of Foggy's and leaped back, severing the connection, panting and gasping. "Is that..." Matt said out loud, his voice seeming to boom and echo without Foggy's voice present to counterbalance it. "Foggy? I can't. I'm sorry, but I just can't."

Was Matt rejecting him? Foggy reached back out to gently try and find out, to re-anchor himself to Matt, and was relieved when Matt let him. There was no rejection, only guilt, fear, and apprehension. Matt was worried about what was going to happen next, about what the connection Foggy had forged with him meant. And he felt bad that Foggy had never talked to him about his abilities, that he hadn't known that this could happen or how bad it had been.

"I didn't know either, Matt," Foggy said without words. "I'm scared too."

Suddenly, a noise broke the tense silence. "Karen, Karen, Karen", it said. It was Matt's phone. Matt picked it up and looked at Foggy, like he expected that Foggy might want to answer. He shook his head no. He didn't think he could, even if he wanted to. It was everything he could do to block out the din around him. It narrowed his world to him and Matt only, left no room for anything or anyone else.

"Karen," Matt said into the phone as he pressed the answer button. Foggy saw him hold the phone away from his ear once she started talking. He could vaguely hear the way she was laying into Matt.

"He's fine, Karen. I'm sorry," Matt said. Foggy wished the man didn't spend so much of his time apologizing. As he thought it, he noticed Matt register it and withdraw into himself slightly. "I should have called. We just got caught up in something. No... no you don't need to come over. Wait..." Matt sighed, and Foggy knew that Karen had hung up and would be there soon.

* * *

Foggy had been floating for a long time, he knew. He vaguely recalled Matt talking to him in a concerned tone, a hand stroking his face, gentle sobs punctuating the emotional noise crowding everything else out. But he just coasted along, letting it all settle around him, too tired to keep fighting, to keep struggling to make sense of any of it.

So it was a surprise when he registered Karen's presence, felt it fight it's way through the haze and make itself known to him. He recognized it clearly, the love and affection reminding him of their whispered conversation earlier on the floor of his darkened office. How long ago had that been? Foggy couldn't remember.

"What are we going to do?" he heard her ask Matt. Her voice sounded hoarse, and there was a lump in her throat.

"I don't know," Matt replied, and Foggy knew that Matt was tired too, the exhaustion bone deep, as though he'd been up for days. Maybe he had been. Foggy couldn't be sure.

"Has he said anything to you at all?" Karen asked.

"Not out loud," Matt said, "But I've been getting through to him. I hope."

Foggy realized that his head was in Karen's lap, and her arms were wrapped around him. He blinked his eyes and looked up at her, reached out to try to let her know he was still with them, that he was still capable of finding his way back.

She gasped slightly and looked down to smile at him. "Foggy..." she whispered. "Hi."

Matt must have felt it too because he moved over to sit closer to them, to take Foggy's hand in his again. Foggy could only stare sadly. He knew that Matt was frustrated with him, and disappointed.

As quickly as he registered Matt's feelings, they were replaced with new ones, these ones directed at him with confidence and clarity. Concern. Hope. Determination. Things that Foggy could tell Matt wanted him to have for himself too.

But Matt alone couldn't help him. The currents of emotion battered at him, and he didn't know if he was strong enough to resist it and gain stability. But... Karen. She was there too. And next to Matt, she was the strongest person Foggy knew.

Gently, so as not to shock her, he reached out and tugged her towards him, tried to wrap her around himself too. And she let him, willingly, pushed herself forward and embraced the connection with a surprising zeal, nodded at him and took a deep breathe.

And suddenly it was like Foggy was standing on solid ground. Gravity reasserted itself. He sat up and pulled Karen into a hug, felt Matt join it. And even once the hug ended and he pulled away from them both, he still knew that they were with him, a part of him. The emotions were still there, brushing at the edge of his consciousness. But he knew who he was again. Or at least, he knew who Karen and Matt needed him to be.

His stomach growled and he laughed. Matt smiled and got up to fix some food for them. Maybe things would be okay after all.


	6. Recovery

Foggy still hadn't spoken. It had been days, and Foggy hadn't said one word, not since before Matt had initially found him in his apartment and called Claire. He was awake, and aware of his surroundings, which was a relief. He was eating. He was functioning. But not entirely. Not enough to leave his apartment, or think about their clients, or return to his normal life. Karen and Matt had been taking turns keeping an eye on him and holding down the fort at their office. Neither of them knew what would happen now, how much better they could expect Foggy to get, whether or not they would be able to continue to keep his power a secret. And neither of them were talking about it. It was as though they both believed that if they didn't voice it out loud then they would never have to deal with it. And so the apartment was always unusually quiet, even as their emotions spoke to one another noisily between rooms. Even as Foggy's warmth and love saturated it, from the carpeting to the ceiling and outwards.

The silence worried Matt, but whenever it did he remembered that Foggy knew it worried him, then worried about that, and then had his worry amplified and thrust back at him through their connection. It was an entirely new sensation, like a feedback loop, and one that Matt didn't know if he would ever get used to. One that he didn't know if he would even have to get used to. Was the connection permanent? Would it get stronger, or slowly fade? He had no way of knowing. The entire thing was confusing, and made Matt deeply uncomfortable. He didn't like feeling so completely exposed, so vulnerable.

But then Foggy knew that too now. There was nothing Foggy didn't know about him. In just a few short months Matt had gone from feeling completely alone to forging bonds he didn't know were possible, from keeping so much from Foggy to being an open book who Foggy could read as easily as he breathed.

And then there was Karen to factor in. Matt knew that Foggy had forged a similar connection to Karen. Foggy had been able to occasionally project things she was feeling towards Matt, to help him understand what he was feeling too. But Matt wasn't certain how the woman fit into what was going on, or how much Foggy was sending to Karen about Matt.

He liked Karen. He really did. But he wasn't as close to her as Foggy clearly was. Maybe it was because in the early days of their friendship he had missed so many opportunities to bond with her because of his need to be on the streets. Maybe it was because he deliberately distanced himself from her at times because he knew she found him attractive. Maybe it was because she had spent so much time during their initial conversations together lying, and so had he. But the fact that Karen might know him the way Foggy did, the fact that she knew Foggy the way he did, made Matt more than a little disturbed and jealous.

"Wrong," was the signal Matt got from Foggy as he lay next to Foggy on the living room rug contemplating the situation. The pair had been listening to Matt's iPod together, Foggy with the headphones in and Matt just there next to him. Foggy had always hated jazz, but for some reason now couldn't get enough of it and seemed settled by it. Matt suspected that it had to do with how much he loved it and the good feelings he associated with it. It made Matt happy to share it with him.

Matt knew that Foggy thought that he was wrong about Karen in a lot of ways. The emotions that Foggy projected towards him when he thought about Karen were becoming familiar, like an old argument long since past the point of hard feelings. Foggy knew that Karen was still lying to Matt and had a secret, but wouldn't share with Matt what it was. Foggy thought that Matt should tell Karen about Daredevil, that it was the right thing to do. Foggy thought that Matt had to be honest with Karen about everything, and was certain that Matt would feel better if Karen was honest with him. Foggy knew, and Matt wasn't even sure how he could know if Matt didn't, that Matt and Karen loved each other the way he loved them.

Matt trusted Foggy completely, but he had spent too long being terrified of his own abilities, of what he was capable of, to take the step of confessing to Karen. The thought of it made him remember that horrible day when he'd had to withstand Foggy's accusations and anger, the way it had felt when Foggy had finally walked out the door. Now, with the three of them all being so emotionally intertwined, what would happen if Karen knew the truth? If she blamed Matt for Elena's death, or Ben's? What would it do to Foggy if she left now?

"Wrong," Foggy signaled again, accompanied by feelings exasperation and impatience. "You're both wrong. Idiots."

Matt craned his neck towards the door as Karen entered the apartment juggling grocery bags with her keys before settling everything onto the kitchen counter. "Hi," she said, and Matt knew it was more for his benefit than Foggy's. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and Matt knew it meant that she was nervous about something.

"Hi," he said back, sitting up.

She moved to put the groceries away in the kitchen, but she had brought a tension into the apartment that was palpable.

"Talk to her," Matt felt Foggy insist. "Please." And suddenly Matt felt Karen at the edge of his consciousness, or at least the feelings that Foggy was able to convey that belonged to her. Fear of rejection and abandonment. Anxiety. A bone-deep weariness at knowing what's about to happen. The feelings were so close to his own that it startled him. What possible reason could she have to think that he would reject her?

Next to him, Foggy sighed softly, and Matt knew that the time had finally come to tell Karen the truth. He just had no idea how to do it.

"Karen," he said, "I have to..."

"No, Matt," she said firmly, cutting him off. Matt could tell that she was supporting herself on the kitchen counter to keep herself from shaking apart, but there was a steely resolve in her voice that he recognized as distinctly hers.

"I have something to tell you," she said. "It's important, and it will probably shock you, but I just need to put it out there and so I'm sorry if this seems blunt or is upsetting. I..." She seemed to be struggling to continue, her breathing quickening and her resolve seeming to weaken. "I'm so sorry. I can't..." Tears started to fall and she looked at Foggy, who took off the headphones and went to her, pulling her into his arms.

Matt was confused, but then he felt Foggy's familiar presence expanding into his mind's eye, and he could see. Really see, but not the room around him. A memory, he realized. Karen's memory. She shot Fisk's assistant. He could picture it - the smug arrogance on his face, and then the crimson red of the all the blood. He could feel Karen's terror, but also the calm and sense of power that came over her as the shots were fired. She had killed someone. And not for the first time.

Suddenly, another image, another memory. One that was much more wildly emotional, of a man laying on top of Karen, pinning her down, of helplessness and rage. Matt forced the memory away. He didn't want it. It didn't belong to him, and he had no right to it.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he heard Karen repeating into Foggy's shirt between sobs as he finally came back to the room, once again seeing nothing but sensing everything.

"Karen..." he said in a daze, standing up and making his way towards them. "It's..." he realized what a lie it would be to tell her everything was okay. "I understand," he said instead. "I do. You did what you had to do."

"No," she said sadly. "I don't deserve that. I should go." She pulled away from Foggy, but he held her tightly and looked panicked at the thought that she might leave. So Matt stepped towards her, knowing what he had to do.

"I'm the man in the mask," he said. "I'm Daredevil. I'm the one who saved you that night in your apartment."

"What?" she asked.

"I would do it again too, Karen," Matt said. "Even knowing what I know. Without hesitating. Because you're a good person. You do deserve our understanding, and our forgiveness even if you can't forgive yourself. I just wish..." Matt began to cry too. "I wish that I could have been there. That you hadn't had to make that choice. It was my fault. Everything with Fisk. Mrs. Cardenas. Ben. It was never on you, Karen. After everything you went through, don't put that on yourself too. It was my responsibility."

"No, Matt," Karen said, "All any of us ever wanted was to help people and do the right thing." Matt felt Foggy send him the shock and awe that she was feeling at his revelation.

"How?" she asked.

"Are you sure you want to know?" Matt asked.

"More sure than I've ever been about anything in my life," she said.

* * *

Karen looked over at Matt as he sat, still and serene, in the corner of the room on a pillow on the floor. Next to her, Foggy lay asleep on the couch.

They had finally forced Foggy to take a sleeping pill after two and a half days spent alternating between pacing and crying, barely eating and refusing to settle down. They understood why. He radiated waves of emotions of varying intensity at them when he was feeling overloaded. Together, Matt and Karen tried to help him but it was a nearly impossible task given that they didn't even understand the bond that they had forged. It was all trial and error, and none of them had any clue if things were progressing and getting better or not. It was frustrating.

With Foggy asleep, this was only the second time since his confession that Karen had gotten the opportunity to watch Matt meditate. He had explained to Karen how much it helped him and how much he relied on it to keep him from becoming over-sensitized and disoriented, but Foggy's emotional state usually prevented him from focusing or withdrawing into himself without causing a panic.

She wondered if the need to protect the streets of Hell's Kitchen, to be Daredevil, also ran deeper than Matt wanted to admit. He hadn't been able to go out in the suit in weeks, since they were hesitant to leave Foggy alone and unsure what would happen if he got hurt and Foggy sensed it. It meant he was more on edge than usual, feeling claustrophobic and trapped by their connection. They could all feel it. It intensified the situation with each passing day and was wearing all of them down.

As exhausting as it was, it fascinated Karen. Matt fascinated her, which she knew he found both amusing and irritating in almost equal measure. She couldn't help it. She wondered how she got so lucky to have met and ended up part of such a powerful bond with two men with such unique and amazing gifts. What did she do to deserve them? She had only ever been more trouble than she was worth, she was certain.

"Matt," she finally asked. She waited, and after a minute his eyes opened and he shifted positions so that he was facing her, a small smile on his face.

"You do realize I'm trying to meditate, right?" he asked, with only a hint of irritation in his voice.

"Sorry," said Karen. "I'm just..." she trailed off, realizing that she shouldn't have interrupted him.

"Bored?" Matt asked.

She nodded. "Yes," she said, even though she now knew that she didn't have to say it out loud. "It's quiet without you guys."

"Without Foggy, you mean?" Matt asked.

"No," said Karen. "You too, Matt." Matt smiled, and for the first time in a long time it was relaxed and reflected genuine happiness. It made Karen happy too, and she wished that Foggy were awake so that they could both really feel it bouncing back and forth between them, humming through the connection Foggy facilitated for them. With him asleep, things between her and Matt were trickier, more awkward.

"Where did you learn how to meditate?" Karen asked. "Or was it just instinct as you figured out how to use your..." she tried to find the appropriate word, "abilities after your accident?"

"I had a mentor," Matt finally said. "Blind, like me. Well, not exactly like me. He taught me how to control my senses, make them work for me rather than against me. He taught me to fight too. In case you were wondering." Matt was clearly uncomfortable at having to answer the question.

"Huh," Karen said. "So you could teach Foggy then, couldn't you? Help him learn how to control all of the emotions he's picking up on? How to meditate, and how to harness the power he has into something he can use?"

"Me?" Matt asked. "No. What Foggy's going through is completely different than what I went through, Karen. Besides, I wasn't even a very good student, so I can't imagine I'd make a very good teacher."

"You weren't a very good student?" Karen said, surprised. "I can't imagine that being true, Matt. Foggy's told me some pretty intense stories from your law school days. Plus, I've seen you fight. There's no way you weren't a teacher's pet, with those moves."

Matt looked pained. "Trust me, Karen, I know it seems like I know what I'm doing, but I don't. I never have."

Karen never did know when to let something go, and so she pushed the issue. "Come on, Matt. That's crazy! I think we should at least explore the possibility that what you learned could be applied to Foggy's situation. Maybe you could really help!"

"Leave it, Karen," Matt said forcefully, and suddenly Karen experienced the sensation of a memory intruding into her mind. She saw a blind man standing above her wielding a cane like a weapon, felt it beating down on her legs and arms, heard insults hurled like daggers slicing into her, sharp and pointed. As the memory faded, she realized that Matt had crumpled to the floor, upset. There was a hand gripping her wrist, and she followed it to see Foggy staring intently at her, crying, his breathing ragged. "Leave it," she felt.

"No," was the message she sent out forcefully to both of them. She looked again at Matt, felt how he did, small and worthless. It wasn't right. "You were a child," she told Matt. "You were a child and what he did was wrong. He was wrong. There is nobody out there who I have ever met, who he could ever have met, who tries harder, is as determined, is as loyal and smart and kind as you. That shithead never deserved you, Matt. Don't you dare let him make you feel that way. He's not worth it."

She felt a triumphant surge of emotion coming from Foggy, knew that he was agreeing with her and sending the full force of their reassurance and certainty to Matt. She felt Matt calm and heard him chuckle. "I know, Karen," he said finally. "I forget sometimes, so thank you for reminding me, but I know."

"Foggy needs you," Karen told him. "We both do. We believe in you."

"I still don't know if the things Stick taught me, the things I taught myself, will be useful," Matt said. "But maybe. We could try." He looked at Foggy, and got a nod in response.

* * *

Matt frowned as he flipped the pancakes in the frying pan, one ear perked up like he was listening for something.

"Is something wrong?" Karen asked as she got ready to leave to check in on the office and pick up necessary files so that Matt could work from Foggy's apartment.

Matt sighed. "No, nothing. Just listening to Foggy singing to himself in the shower. He's doing Les Mis today. Yesterday it was the soundtrack to the movie Beetlejuice." He chuckled to himself, but Karen could tell that it was a desperate attempt to lift his own spirits.

"It's nice to hear him sing, isn't it?" she said.

"I just..." Matt said, stumbling over his words, "I wish it wasn't the only time I heard him do it anymore. I miss the sound of his voice, Karen."

"I know," Karen said, and she thought that she did.

"No," Matt said, slamming his hand down on the counter. "You don't. Because you get to see him, Karen. You get smiles and tears and silly faces. His voice - the way he used to joke and fill the silence with nonsense, the way that he would narrate the world for me that I couldn't experience, gestures and television and even the weather - that was all I had with him for so long. And as much as I love being able to feel him, know what's going on in his head, and being able to share things with him that I've never been able to share with anyone, it's not the same. I love him now, I do, but I miss who he was."

"Matt," Karen said gently as she headed towards the door, "You know he knows that, right?"

The bathroom door creaked open, and Foggy's slowly stepped out in his robe and clutching a towel like a security blanket.

"I'm going to leave you two alone," Karen said. "I'll be back in a little while. You two don't party too hard while I'm gone." The door shut with a thud behind her that seemed to echo in the quiet of the apartment.

"I'm sorry," Matt said finally. "I know how hard this is for you. It's selfish for me to want something you can't give me. For me to make you feel bad about any of this."

Foggy walked towards Matt and shook his head no. "Matt," he finally said and Matt gasped when he saw Foggy's lips move as he said it, heard his voice for the first time in weeks. "I'm sorry," Foggy said. "I got caught up in all this. I didn't think it meant that much to you."

"Of course it does," Matt said. "It meant..." but he stopped himself "means," he corrected, "everything to me."

"Okay," Foggy said, and he hugged Matt to him. "I'll try. I promise I'll try."

Matt just cried softly into his shoulder while Foggy rubbed his back.

"Do you want me to do Les Mis out here for you? The acoustics aren't as good, but the shower won't distort it." Matt laughed at him, a feeling of relief sweeping over him that he hadn't felt in what seemed like forever. "Since you like my voice so much," Foggy continued, "Despite you telling me in college, oh what was it again... that it reminded you of a cat being run through a wood chipper? It was very descriptive, I remember."

Foggy laughed too. He had forgotten how great it felt and resolved to make it happen more often.

* * *

"Are you sure you're going to be okay?" Matt asked as he packed his laptop into his bag.

Foggy laughed at Matt's fussing, and gently sent him feelings or reassurance.

"I know, I know," Matt said with a smile. "I'm a mother hen. I'm sorry. I can't help it. I worry about you."

"I know, buddy," Foggy said, "But I'll be okay. I need you as a partner more than I need you as a friend today. Because of me, we haven't picked up enough business lately to make sure we can keep the lights on, so you and Karen need to make this one count. Land this client, Matt. I'll be fine."

"You're sure?" Matt asked.

"Yeah!" said Foggy, "I've been really getting into the zone with you when we meditate, and all those techniques you taught me - the breathing exercises, how to find focus points - they've been really working. Go, already!"

Foggy practically shoved Matt out the door and locked it behind him, reaching out to ensure that he hadn't been too rude. It amused him that Matt seemed to be having a harder time letting go than he did.

As Foggy leaned against the door, he was pleased to find that even as Matt got further away, he could still feel him on the edge of his consciousness, and could feel Karen even though she was already at the office. They were a part of him now, and knowing that helped him calm himself as a flood of emotions battered him and a mild panic began to rise in his chest.

He breathed deeply and counted the breaths as Matt had taught him, then closed his eyes and set to work separating the various emotions happening around him into distinct thoughts, feelings and memories belonging to individual people. In the past few weeks, he had learned that taking the care and energy to separate them helped him keep them separate from himself and establish the distance he needed to function. It was tiring, but he was getting better at it. He hoped that someday he could learn to do it instinctively and effortlessly, the way that Matt had learned to block and use his senses as necessary.

As he slowly sifted through all of the emotions happening around him, he became aware of a particular set of strong feelings coming from the other side of his front door. There was a child there. And they were having a panic attack.

He opened the door a crack and peered out. His neighbor's son was sitting on the floor, banging his head against his own front door repeatedly. He couldn't have been more than ten years old. He looked up and caught Foggy staring, gasping in surprise. Foggy panicked and slammed the door quickly.

Slowly, he opened it again so that the kid could see him. "Hey," he said. "Where's your mom?"

"I don't know," said the boy. "She was supposed to be here when I got home from school."

"You don't have a key?" Foggy asked.

"No," said the boy. "She's always here."

The kid was freaked out. Where the hell was his mother?

"Does your mom have a cell phone?" Foggy asked. "You could use my phone to call her."

"I don't know her number," said the boy. "Where is she? She's supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to be home alone."

"I'm sure she's fine," he said, and Foggy gently reached out, worried that the boy would sense what he was doing even if he might not know how he did it, and tried to send a sense of calm and reassurance his way. He visibly calmed, and Foggy breathed a small sigh of relief.

"I'm Foggy," he said.

"That's not a real name," said the boy.

"Is too," Foggy insisted, sensing that the boy might respond to him stooping down to a child's level. Kids always loved that, he knew.

"I'm Mark," came the response, accompanied by a small smile.

"I'll tell you what, Mark," said Foggy, "why don't you come in and wait with me for now, and I'll see if maybe the super has your mom's number so we can find her."

"Okay," Mark said, shuffling through Foggy's front door with his backpack in his hand.

While Mark got settled on the couch and turned on the television, Foggy looked up the super's number in his own cell phone and made the call. The conversation was brief, but productive. The super couldn't give out another tenant's phone number, but he agreed to call Mark's mother to let her know what was going on.

With that out of the way, Foggy hesitantly took a spot on the couch next to Mark, who had found an episode of Spongebob Squarepants to watch.

"What's wrong with you?" Mark asked abruptly.

"What?" Foggy asked. "That's a really rude question. Why would you think something's wrong with me?" He knew that there was no malice behind it, only a child's curiosity.

"My mom says that you're weird. I heard her talking to Mrs. Owens on the other side of us, and she said that you're a drunk," Mark said. "Mrs. Owens said that you stopped coming out but that you had friends living with you and she's talked to them. She said you must be hard up if a blind guy's the one taking care of you. I've seen him around sometimes with his sunglasses and his cane. He's real serious all the time. Are you dying?"

Foggy giggled at the child's stream of consciousness train of thought. "No," he said. "Not dying. Just having a hard time, like Mrs. Owens said. Boy, this building's full of busybodies. How did I not know that before?"

Mark shrugged like he didn't know, and Foggy appreciated how literally the kid took his question.

"My friend Matt is really serious all the time, isn't he?" Foggy asked.

"I'd be serious too if I couldn't see anything. I'd have to concentrate real hard to know where I was going," Mark said. Foggy liked Mark a lot.

"Do you have homework or something you should be doing?" Foggy asked.

"Nope," said Mark. Foggy knew he was lying, so he turned off the television. Mark whined and threw his arms up in the air like he was having a seizure. But eventually he pulled a stack of homework out of his backpack and spread it over Foggy's coffee table.

* * *

Later that night, Matt went to put his keys in the door, but was surprised to find it open. When he and Karen entered, their eyes widened at the site in front of them.

There Foggy sat, surrounded by a half-dozen moms from the building, listening intently as they gossiped and complained while their kids sat at his dining room table with coloring books open.

"I cannot believe he did that to you!" Foggy said, and Matt and Karen recognized through their connection to him that Foggy was actually encouraging the women to continue, sending them feelings of confident empowerment as they dished. "I know, right?" one of the women said.

Foggy noticed that his friends were home and looked up, a sheepish grin on his face. "Oh, uh, hi guys!"

"Hi," they said, not sure what exactly they were looking at. As Karen looked over at Matt, she was amused by the wide grin on his face, fondness apparent. In her head, Karen could almost hear Matt saying "That's just like Foggy, isn't it?" and realized that maybe all the time she and Matt had spent together had bonded them too, even if they didn't have mutant powers.


	7. A New Normal

"So you haven't experienced any adverse side effects of going off of the medication so far?" the doctor asked.

"Nope," said Foggy, nervous but trying to project cheerfulness and appear relaxed. "Sorry, Doc. I know that you were probably expecting a meltdown after all these years, but I actually feel great!"

"And your powers? The empathy?" the doctor asked.

"Mild," Foggy said, hoping she believed him. "I can pick up on people's emotions here and there, but I'm starting to think maybe the school psychiatrist and my parents just worried too much. It's nothing I can't handle."

"Well alright then," the doctor said. "I'm glad to hear it, Mr. Nelson. I haven't been able to find any other issues or concerns. Your heart rate is normal, blood pressure too. And you said you've been drinking less, feeling more energetic. It seems like it's worked out for you. I'd like to schedule another check-up next month, just in case."

"Sounds good!" Foggy hopped off of the vinyl bed that the doctor had made him sit on and gathered up his things, breathing a sigh of relief and focusing for a moment on sending the good news to Matt. As he spotted Matt sitting patiently in the waiting room, he felt the man amplify his relief with his own and send it back to him, and grinned.

The pair left the doctor's office and walked back towards their office at a leisurely pace, Matt's hand nestled in the crook of Foggy's elbow.

"So it really went well?" Matt asked.

"It did," Foggy said. "The doctor thinks I'm just a low-level mutant whose powers are simple and uncomplicated. I think I'm safe for now."

"Good," Matt said, and Foggy knew that his friend had been really worried. The last thing either of them needed was for Foggy's powers to come to the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D. or local law enforcement.

"I'm okay, Matt," Foggy said, ensuring that Matt felt his certainty.

"I know," said Matt, "I just worry about you."

"And I don't worry about you?" Foggy asked. Matt got uncomfortable as Foggy sent him memories of himself bleeding on his apartment floor and showing up to the office with cuts and bruises.

"Foggy..." Matt said, an apology ready.

"You don't have to apologize, Matt," Foggy said. "You are who you are. And I am who I am. We're both destined to worry. Just let me help. Don't shut me out again."

"I couldn't if I tried," Matt said, and he was right.

* * *

"So," Karen asked as she packed up her things at the end of the day and prepared to lock the office doors behind them. "How did everything go with the big date?"

"Oh!" Foggy said, remembering that he hadn't told her yet, "So well! They got along like chocolate and peanut butter. I knew they would."

Karen listened as Foggy told her the story of how he had finally convinced his landlord to go on a date with Mrs. Papadoulis, a tenant on the fifth floor of his building. His landlord was so pleased with how things worked out that he had pushed fixing Foggy's leaky sink to the top of his priority list and a second date had already been scheduled.

It made Karen's heart expand whenever Foggy told her stories about the people in his building, on his block even, who he had been able to help somehow or who he had befriended. Since he had finally begun to talk to other people again, since that day that she and Matt had come home to find Foggy surrounded by neighbors, it was like Foggy had embraced the gifts he had and found a new purpose.

It wasn't just neighbors. Karen noticed that their clients always felt more at ease after a meeting with him, and that even the people in their office building seemed to be more supportive of their firm. Foggy's ability to sense people's emotions and make them feel as though he really cared about them drew people to him like a magnet.

Karen even found herself feeling kinder and more generous, seeing the best in people in a way that she never had before. After all of her experiences, she wouldn't have thought it possible. But that, she knew, was the power of Foggy Nelson.

"Karen," Foggy said gently, and she realized that she had zoned out while listening to him.

"Sorry," she said. "I was just thinking about how happy I am that you're okay. Better than okay, even."

"Well," he said, "I have you and Matt to thank for that."

"We didn't do anything," said Karen.

"Are you kidding?" Foggy asked. "You guys are the reason I went off the suppressants to begin with, Karen. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. Thank you."

She could tell he meant it. And that he was hungry. "Food?" she asked.

"Food," he said. "Hey, Matt?" he yelled.

Matt came out of his office, but shook his head sadly. "You guys go. I've got other plans tonight."

Once, they would have pressed to know what beautiful woman had somehow caught his attention. Now, though, they both knew better.

"Be safe, buddy," Foggy said solemnly.

"I will," Matt replied, and they all could tell how much he meant it.

* * *

Matt took out the two drug dealers swiftly, one with a kick to the legs that was so hard he heard the break, the pain causing the man to pass out, and the other with an uppercut that he knew his dad would have been impressed with.

He swung back around quickly to face the gang leader who he had come for, the man in charge. The man had a switchblade pulled out, ready for a fight, but Matt was unconcerned. Let him try and take him down.

Suddenly, the man's heart began to race uncontrollably, his limbs trembling so hard that the switchblade fell from his hand, the metal clattering on the cement. Was the man having a heart attack?

"Yo, man... what the hell are you? I don't... what?" The man ran away, scared beyond belief, his legs almost getting tangled up underneath him in his struggle to leave quickly.

Matt was confused, until he felt a familiar presence move into the shadows of the alley from the street. "Did you do that?" he asked.

"Yeah, sorry to deny you the pleasure of beating on the guy," Foggy said. Matt could tell he didn't mean it.

"You let him get away," Matt said, angry. "That man is responsible for dozens of gang-related shootings, Foggy."

"And now he's going to turn himself into the police. Probably having pissed himself with terror over his encounter with the Devil," Foggy said. "That was what you wanted to happen anyway, right? I just helped you out. One less stain on your conscience."

"That was really dangerous, Foggy. What if he had spotted you?" Matt asked. Foggy shrugged like it didn't matter, and Matt respected the fact that he didn't narrate the gesture.

"I thought we agreed that you would let me do this," Matt said. "That you understood why I have to."

"You know, I'm learning that I can do a lot of good. I can really help people. But I also know now that you have to be willing to sacrifice something of yourself to do it. You can't be afraid of the darkness if you want to have any hope of illuminating it. So believe me, Matt. I understand. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that if you ever need help, I'm around. Karen too. And to tell you that we ended up getting enough Thai food for three if you're interested. After."

Matt nodded. Foggy turned around and left, and Matt listened to him head in the direction of his apartment before allowing himself to grin as he leaped from a dumpster to a fire escape and upon onto the roof. He listened, as usual, but now he heard as much good as bad, recognized the din of life teeming underneath the call of the sirens. He was glad that he knew that someone else was out there to handle it with him.


End file.
